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Comment by dougdimmadome | Hacker News Reader

In Ireland a few years ago a plastic bag levy was introduced. If you want a plastic bag at the checkout, you have to pay 5c for each one.

Now everyone has reusable shopping bags they bring to the stores.

The bags are much more rugged than single use plastic bags or paper, and reuse is better than recycling.

However, I think shopping bags are probably not the intended market for this stuff, and the need is more to replace the plastic wrapping that covers food. There have been efforts here and in the UK to reduce the amount of packaging in the first place but there will continue to be places where we still need it for a while

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Similar thing in California happened about 10 years ago - 10 cents per bag. Unfortunately, it backfired - because the 10 cent bags are thicker (they can't be designed for "single use", so they have to be thick enough to be "reusable"), the amount of plastic bag waste in landfills has actually risen dramatically in that time.

California kinda screwed up by not mandating paper bags, or carving out an exception for them to promote their use.

[0]https://publicinterestnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01... - page 14

> because the 10 cent bags are thicker (they can't be designed for "single use", so they have to be thick enough to be "reusable"), the amount of plastic bag waste in landfills has actually risen

In New Jersey the problem was grocery delivery companies. Like, yes, if I have a constant stream of any packaging I’m going to dispose of it.

In California, stores giving away free bags seems to have compounded the problem. Banning single-use plastic bags and adding a bag tax seems like the way to go.

>In California, stores giving away free bags seems to have compounded the problem. Banning single-use plastic bags and adding a bag tax seems like the way to go.

That's what California did, and it failed. Nobody is "giving away free bags"...

We have that in Spain too. I still pay for the plastic bag like 50% of the time, because they're useful to take out the trash. Otherwise I wouldn't be paying the 5c but I would need to buy trash bags.

PS: the best reusable shopping bag I have is a traditional Taiwanese shopping bag a friend brought from there. Light, beautiful, rugged, holds a lot of weight, seems indestructible. A pity they don't sell these here, I live in fear of losing it :D

Sound great, any particular brand?

I just reuse the paper bags, and I really wish someone would sell slightly thicker better-built paper bags because they have a lot of good attributes versus reusable bags. They biodegrade, they're made from waste and recycled wood and paper pulp, and they can be produced locally. The only thing that makes them not ideal is the handles tear off.

Frequently the store staff have to double-bag everything with paper because the bags tear so easily. But when double-bagged I can get 5 or 10 uses out of them, which suggests that the bag just needs to be thicker to be highly reusable.

>> The only thing that makes them not ideal is the handles tear off.

Do you live in California? Nevada? I bet it is somewhere hot and dry. Paper bags are not fun in the pacific northwest, or the north, or deep south ... basically anywhere with moisture in the air. Either you put them down in a puddle by accident, or you get snow on them and it melts in your car on the way home. Either way, the bottom will fall out the moment you pick them up.

Bankers boxes would probably last for years of use. Built in handles. Stackable and rigid in a vehicle.

This could work but you’d probably need to re-think the shopping cart too so they can be easily re-used.

Paper bags are available in a range of thicknesses, just as approximately every other paper product is.

I don't remember the exact figure off the top of my head, but if memory serves well it was in the ballpark of a decade that you could buy a new plastic bag every day and throw it away after, and it would still create less CO2 in total than one reusable cloth bag. Modern plastic is ridiculously cheap to manufacture whereas reusable bags waste a lot of energy and water. A good example of a movement where people feel good about themselves, but actually they're not making things better.

Last I read that was debunked. It was based on one study or article that made a really bad assumption and then it spread. Someone went and did the figures again and it was way off by a few orders of magnitude and in fact only a few uses of a reusable bag means it’s better. Like you I don’t have the link to hand sorry.

Externalities are hard.

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/04/30/plastic-paper-c...

By estimated impact: cotton > paper > plastic, but more constructively:

> Ultimately, the single use of any bag is the worst possible choice. The key to reducing your environmental impact is to use whatever bags you have around the house as many times and in as many ways as possible.

So it's better that I need to pay for thicker bags just to put in my wastebasket to collect trash? How is that better than getting a t-shirt bag from the store to carry my items home, then use the bag to line my trash, then throwing the mess away?

By volume I throw away more diapers in a month than an entire lifetime of plastic bags. Fighting plastic bags is what the rich companies making actual pollution want you to focus on so you aren't fighting real pollution.

> Fighting plastic bags is what the rich companies making actual pollution want you to focus on so you aren't fighting real pollution.

Why can't we fight both? Reducing both plastic bag pollution and "real" pollution seems better than just one or the other.

People have limited campaigning energy and politicians have limited political capital, so it probably does divert some attention from the bigger problems.

CO2 is not the only factor. You also have to look at the plastic bags that are floating around in rivers and oceans.

That's not all they're [ultimately] floating around in...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/20/...

CO2 isn't the driver here, it's mountains of non biodegradable plastic bags getting into rivers, oceans, everywhere.

That basically doesn't happen in the USA so there's not a reason to switch here.

Exactly. I don't understand why this isn't acknowledged more.

Banning plastic bags in the US does absolutely nothing for the plastic bags clogging waterways in Asia.

Sometimes people think plastic recycling in the US is shipped to Asia where it ends up in waterways but that's not a thing either. It might get buried in a landfill there rather than recycled, but compressed pallets of plastic recycling aren't getting dumped into rivers. That's not a thing. The bags aren't flying away in the wind or something either. All the plastic clogging rivers -- that's all local consumer littering.

That's because the US exports plastic waste to other countries. So yes, there is good reason.

I was under the impression that Americans landfilled their garbage. I don't doubt that waste export is a thing, but is it really that large a proportion?

The US is the only country in the developed world that hasn't ratified the Basel Convention [0] and the US exports close to a billion tons of plastic waste to other countries per year [1]. The trash you see building up in third world countries is in large part from the United States, not from those countries themselves.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel_Convention

[1] https://www.invw.org/2022/04/18/rich-countries-are-illegally...

According to [2] 35.7 million tons of plastic waste is produced per year, and 0.61 million tons are exported.

That leaves 35 million tons, and with only 5% being recycled, there's plenty of plastic left to go into 'rivers, oceans, everywhere'.

[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-us-recycled-ju...

Most reusable bags here in Italy are still made of plastic, but much sturdier than single use shopping bags. Personally I like them. My only issue is the few times when I forget to put them back into my car.

> when I forget to put them back into my car

I permanently keep two or three in there.

Here are some numbers on reusability vs single-use plastic bags https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/grocery-bag-environmental...

Bottomline, it depends, but for most commons cases it seems worth it to reuse reusable plastic bags.

but you are correct about cloth bags, those are not worth it at all

Those reusable bags are made of plastic. They degrade in different ways. How many bags did they replace when they reach their end of life? Where do they go at the end of life? How much do they cost?

The previous plastic bags may have been reused (ie for small garbage bags). Are consumers now just purchasing equivalent plastic bags for that purpose?

I think there are so many unanswered questions and the benefits can vary by region.

It's far from clear that "reusable" (thick, thin plastic bags are reusable too) plastic bags are a better deal environmentally. If you have to get 300 uses out of a thick one to break even, does the average "reusable" hit this number?

I loathe modern grocery store "reusable" bags. They can't be recycled, in that I can't toss them into my blue bin, I have to take them back to the store (I don't) and story is nothing happens to them anyway. I hate the texture of them, I hate the way the lay. I find them just awful.

For the grocery store, we have a set of, I guess, 10 or so cloth bags we use. We've used the core set every week for over 12 years. Had a tailor stitch up a hole in one of them once, wash them every few months.

We have a large, cloth Target logo'd bag I stuff in the bottom. It's about 1.5x the size of the normal ones, if I put it on top they inevitably drag it out first and fill it with the milk, juice, bowling balls (both of them), cinder blocks and whatever else is super heavy that we happened to buy that day. "But it fits!" "Yea, and now it weight 50lb!" Couldn't stuff it with cotton balls, stuffed animals, and the Cool Whip.

So, yea, bottom of the bag it goes.

I know there are concerns with cloth, and we wrap notably meats in the light plastic bags to help contain contamination. It's not been a real problem.

We've just started (past few months) using reusable mesh bags for the produce, that's working out ok so far.

Same in Canada. The reusable bags that the stores sell are 5-20$. You get hit once with that and you'll start bringing your own bags.

It's actually really simple to influence human behavior with pricing!

Its not all great, these reusable bags are starting to fill up in landfills. People forget to bring them, or make an unplanned stop to the grocery store to pick up a few things and buy a new bag. Then at home the bags pile up and get thrown out. Many are barely 'reusable', the are crap and don't get used again an get thrown out (my favorite are the ikea bags, they are big and great for groceries - vs many grocery store offerings which are garbage).

Nutshell, it they may not be a net plus for the environment when so many poor quality bags which are more energy/resource intensive to make end up being single-use anyway.

Have you a source for this? Because all the published info I’ve seen says that it is great and it works as intended.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-021-01946-6

I've seen several studies that dispute the efficacy of reusable plastic items (bags, cups, etc). The energy costs of producing the "sturdy" alternative are often high enough to offset the gain in reuse.

IIRC, one study showed that reusing the single-use grocery bag one time (as a trash bin liner) was enough to put it back ahead of the typical $1 reusable bags available at the check-out counter at most grocers.

Since reusable bags have so little mass, I am not so concerned about the energy use to produce. More about the amount of bags and micro-plastics that escape into the environment.

That's fair. And I'm definitely in favor of doing whatever's best for the environment. Just pointing out that it's not as simple as "reusable is better" - depending on the set of metrics being measured, it might not be.

That doesnt back up your claim of these reusable bags piling up in landfills, it says it’s not as clean cut as it being better.

I never claimed they're filling up landfills, that was somebody else. I was just providing some more context, which as you note, indicates it's not as simple as "reusable good, one-use bad".

everyone I know has a bag of "bag for life" bags, and yes sometimes you forget to bring them and you end up buying more. but they're definitely a net good. the amount of bags sold to people who forgot theirs is orders of magnitude than the number of bags that would be handed out when they were free.

I was shocked recently when I visited a shop in another european country and they had regular non-reusable bags, it seemed so primitive!

> Many are barely 'reusable', the are crap and don't get used again an get thrown out

there are thinner plastic ones, but even the lightest "reusable" bags we have last for months if not years. unless you're buying pineapples and throwing stars every time you shop they should last you a while.

> and they had regular non-reusable bags, it seemed so primitive!

It's all about vibes with you people.

> these reusable bags are starting to fill up in landfills

Can you cite where this is happening?

The killer is grocery delivery services. They got wrapped up in the legislation, so they must deliver groceries in reusable bags. It's totally impractical to come an collect the bags again (collect, clean, sort), so instead our small office, for instance, goes through about a dozen of them a month.

It's all so tiring. Make packaging from manufacturers biodegradable by law. Why is the consumer burdened with these decisions?

Is this some sort of deranged lobbying scheme?

Over here in the UK, our grocery delivery service (Sainsburys) just comes to your door with flat crates full of unbagged shopping. You meet them at the door and transfer the shopping into your own bags. It's a lot slower than just grabbing bagged shopping out of the crates, and I have no idea how it works for folks in flats/apartments (do the delivery folks have to walk each crate up four flights of stairs individually?) but it is nice that it doesn't cause as much direct waste. Albeit that it might cause indirect waste due to now needing more vans on the road to service the same number of users, hm.

You can carry the crate to the kitchen and dump out the contents on your worktop/floor. No need for the intermediate bagging!

I agree things were easier when they delivered it in bags though.

With the way groceries are usually packed (with smashables like bread and milk on top), that sounds like a good way to accidentally make French toast.

> The killer is grocery delivery services.

I don't think so. This is largely dependant on each grocery delivery service, but of you look at it the worst cases are actually just continuing business as usual,which is hardly a regression. In the meantime, some services managed to completely eliminate the use of plastic bags.

As an example, for the past year or so I had a groceries delivery service use their old plastic bags, but they also implemented a charge-back service where they pay you back when/if you return them in the following delivery. This is clearly an improvement. In the meantime I had competing supermarket chains completely switch away from single-use bags to alternatives such as reusable plastic crates and even reusable cardboard crates. Behemoths such as Amazon Fresh completely switched to a mix of paper bags, for example.

Look at VDA's KLT system for example to see something that works readily for the reusable crate task. Just hand over your empty crate into the empty hands/van-shelf-space of the delivery driver after taking the crate with your fresh goods out of their hands.

Bonus: the KLT system easily offers enough assistance to automated/mechanized handling that the box delivery task doesn't require humans.

Could probably easily have a portal crane style 4-wheel robot to drive the new box from the van to your door, drop it, and bring back an empty box you put out for it.

Well, something about curbs, but the stair dolly (big wheel made of 3 smaller wheels) style drive can probably cope with most.

Originally the KLT boxes were made to elide re-packing and manual box handling in the many-small-supplier-companies car industry of Germany. They differ from the more widely seen euro boxes by having molded features to allow a robot gripper to "plug" into any of the 6 sides of the cuboid and get a solid grasp of the box suitable for (re-)stacking them as long as their nominal load rating is adhered to. Also at least one, if space a short and a long side though, have a slot to hold a DIN A-series piece of (tick/heavy) paper describing the box contents, such that the box won't be contaminated with sticky tape residue.

When they're eventually broken from old age or abuse, they can be recycled cleanly because they are normed to be a pretty specific plastic and to (for interchange at least) be one of that colors (grey and a dark blue).

I have seen a local service, picnic, using a small urban-only electric truck (if not even a tricycle) who's back is just a 120 cm (plus tolerances plus door thing) wide shelf to be used with 40x60 cm euro boxes. If they were KLTs you could just put the box as-is in your pantry instead of doing the "dump onto kitchen table" tactic, I guess.

There are ways to get around the "oh crap, I forgot the bags" depending on how the store does things. For example, the Aldi stores I shop at in the US have a couple of cages with empty boxes in them. The boxes on the shelves get emptied and then the employees round them up and drop them in accessible cages/crates. This allows a person to choose to either buy a paper bag, buy a reusable bag, or make due with a couple of free boxes that were going to be disposed of anyways.

costco has been doing this since the beginning!

Not something I have in my area, so I have no experience with Costco.

That may vary by location.

The Aldi I usually go to has staff that are so ridiculously efficient that there are nearly zero empty boxes on the shelves, and the rolling "box cage" is nearly always tucked away somewhere unseen unless they're actively using it.

This isn't a complaint. It's a nice place to shop, and the stock is always very orderly compared to some other locations.

But GFS? They've got boxes at the checkout. I think the expectation is that the customer is supposed to box their own stuff, but they always do it for me if there isn't a line.

My love of Aldi comes from the fact that my attention isn't being accosted as soon as I walk in the door. It's the stuff I need, without advertisements, screens, music, etc. The price doesn't hurt either. Before I began shopping there, I was exclusively at The Fresh Market, so when I switched, my grocery bill was cut by 2/3.

Aldi is a good jam, for sure.

Their hardgoods tend to be tremendously high-quality for the price, too: Stuff is frequently ~half what I'd expect to pay elsewhere for something similar. Their buyers must be stellar.

Where I live, Aldi does not provide boxes or bags of any sort. You have to bring your own bags and, barring that, take the cart to your car and unload there directly. A bit time consuming, but not a disaster. It has been this way for at least a decade (as long as I've lived here) and people have long been used to it.

It meant that when all other supermarkets stopped offering free plastic bags, most of the shopping populace was already used to keeping reusable bags in their cars or purses, so it was a pretty easy transition.

My local groceries store used to do this and it was great, using the boxes they were going to throw out anyway for bringing groceries home worked well. We used to also go there to get boxes if just needed boxes for something. The problem is they just stopped doing it. They no longer put those boxes out for customers to use.

Costco and Sam’s club have this (at least some stores), good if you have young kids since they can always find a use for boxes

> Its not all great, these reusable bags are starting to fill up in landfills. People forget to bring them, or make an unplanned stop to the grocery store to pick up a few things and buy a new bag. Then at home the bags pile up and get thrown out.

Your comment is a textbook argument of perfect being the enemy of good.

Sure, some bags are thrown out. Sure, people use more than one. Sure, people can buy them if they feel they need them.

That's perfectly fine, as that's completely besides the point.

What you're failing to mention is that thanks to this push to adopt reusable bags the use of single-use plastic bags plummeted. You no longer see over a dozen single-use bags being thrown out at each and every single shopping trip. These bags aren't recyclable and disintegrate very easily, making it extremely hard to pull them out of the environment once they get there.

You're also somehow leaving out is the fact that some major supermarkets chains are making available reusable shopping bags made of natural fiber. It's not a given that you're replacing large volumes of single-use plastic with small volumes of reusable plastic, as you're also seeing small volumes of natural fabric being used.

You're also leaving out the fact that this push is taking single-use plastic out of the market but nothing forces customers to adopt the store's own offerings. Anyone is able to buy whatever type of shopping bag suits their fancy.

So no, you're not seeing plastic being replaced with plastic. You're seeing drastic reductions in plastic use by eliminating perverse incentives to consume single-use plastic containers, and the adoption of substitute goods that have a far preferable environmental footprint.

Why care if they get thrown out? If you are the median American, you burnt (aka "disposed of in the atmosphere") far more petroleum driving to the store than a hundred single-use bags. I bet a single bag is of comparable volume to tire wear. Get off your high horse and start focusing on real problems. Automobiles are responsible for more micro-plastics than single-use items, plus 6PPD poisoning us. Single-use plastics are just a useful tool to distract from the real sources of pollution.

I've heard this argument before and totally agree that single use plastics are a tiny fraction of the total problem. But as a Canadian I like that the law forced me to think about my consumption habits, as well as it helped create conversation topics with other people.

That's exactly the outcome they wanted. Are those discussions leading to action on topics to reduce automobile dependence (the actual source of micro-plastic contamination)? If not, then you're part of the problem.

Well a lot of discussions due lead to some actions that I wouldn't have done on my own like reducing animal proteins, or shopping local for everything.

I don't see why caring about plastic bags is mutual exclusive from caring about automobile free cities. I'm 40 and have never owned a car. I'm a big NotJustBikes and StrongTowns proponent. We can for sure debate car dependence and what policies we should advocate for. But this was an article about biodegradable plastics.

Montreal is shutting down a ton of streets every summer to make them walkable, and we've built out an extensive bike infrastructure. All great things! We could make public transportation free.

> Why care if they get thrown out? If you are the median American, you burnt (aka "disposed of in the atmosphere") far more petroleum driving to the store than a hundred single-use bags. I bet a single bag is of comparable volume to tire wear. Get off your high horse and start focusing on real problems. Automobiles are responsible for more micro-plastics than single-use items, plus 6PPD poisoning us. Single-use plastics are just a useful tool to distract from the real sources of pollution.

I don't understand why you insist that we need to solve the "real" problems of pollution before we dare think about other smaller, easier to solve problems. It's not like we're playing a video game where society only has a finite amount of elbow grease to apply to this set of issues. We can reduce plastic bag pollution while also working toward reducing the pollution from automobiles, tire wear, and whatever else you on your own high horse have deigned to be "real problems".

These are not conflicting goals.

Throwing plastic in the trash is not pollution.

"We" are not working on solving those other actual sources of pollution. We're just making people's lives worse. People think they've "done their part" by not using bags, when they haven't done shit.

I think your response is overly optimistic; what you're saying is _possible_, but actual deployment of the policy leaves quite a bit to be desired.

So, when you say

> So no, you're not seeing plastic being replaced with plastic.

I think immediately of NJ's attempt to wrangle this problem.

> While the state’s ban — which, unlike those of other states, also prohibited single-use paper bags — led to a more than 60 percent decline in total bag volumes, it also had an unintended consequence: a threefold increase in plastic consumption for grocery bags.

> How this happened is no mystery.

> The massive increase in plastic consumption was driven by the popularity of heavy-duty polypropylene bags, which use about fifteen times more plastic than polyethylene plastic bags.

> “Most of these alternative bags are made with non-woven polypropylene, which is not widely recycled in the United States and does not typically contain any post-consumer recycled materials,” the study explains. “This shift in material also resulted in a notable environmental impact, with the increased consumption of polypropylene bags contributing to a 500% increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions compared to non-woven polypropylene bag production in 2015.”

https://fee.org/articles/new-jerseys-plastic-bag-ban-backfir...

I'm supportive of the goal, but I really do think that making laws that are simple solutions to complex problems really can backfire and be a net negative, so we need to think several steps ahead.

> I think your response is overly optimistic; what you're saying is _possible_, but actual deployment of the policy leaves quite a bit to be desired.

Again: textbook example of perfect being the enemy of good.

I completely disagree with your take. I've seen whole supermarket chains switch from single-use plastic bags to multi-use cardboard crates in their delivery services, and also to paper bags/containers. That's pretty much the definition of the ideal outcome.

So you're seeing some plastic being thrown out. That's besides the point. The point is how many volume of plastic is being dumped onto the environment after supermarkets switched away from cheap single-use plastic bags.

> So you're seeing some plastic being thrown out. That's besides the point. The point is how many volume of plastic is being dumped onto the environment after supermarkets switched away from cheap single-use plastic bags.

I'm not seeing anything myself, and I cited no anecdotes. I cited a study that found plastic use went up after the ban.

> these reusable bags are starting to fill up in landfills. People forget to bring them, or make an unplanned stop to the grocery store to pick up a few things and buy a new bag

Put a tax on them that funds an environmental initiative, whether that be decarbonisation, trash clean-up or better landfill management.

you should shop around. I see the heavy plastic bags in the US$2-5 range. Check out Trader Joe's if you have them. I've been using the same couple of TJ bags for years.

> Same in Canada. The reusable bags that the stores sell are 5-20$.

Cents, not dollars, right?

In Norway the price increased to about 50 cents per plastic bag. I know it made me start carrying a reusable bag.

Reuse is better than recycling when the reusable bags are more efficient to produce / number of uses than single use bags. More than one researcher has disputed this for "reusable" plastic bags. (I reuse the "non-reusable" ones...)

Yeah, FWIW, this kind of bag fee is very common in the U.S. as well, with the same effects (though perhaps not in northern Michigan). In fact, single use plastic bags are outright banned in many parts of the U.S. I guess I'm not sure what GP means by "No one ever talks about paper bags."

I guess they mean that paper bags are biodegradable and have been for ever. However, plastic bags have been used instead as they are cheaper. He says cost is what drives this so for a barley or corn plastic bag to work it has to be as cheap as a regular plastic bag or at least cheaper than a paper bag.

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